The
Dogs’ Home, the Power Station, the Pleasure Gardens. These
were the things that Battersea was known for to outsiders, but they
were not really part of the Battersea we knew. A little borough,
hugged in the bend of the river, it was largely unknown. It had none
of the dramatic qualities that made the East End famous, although the
times it had been through were as hard. Here were no doss-houses, no
Salvation Army kip-houses, no large congregations of lonely men.
There were precious few large institutions of any sort - homes for
the aged, prisons, hotels, lunatic asylums. It was the home of
gentle people, backyard owners. The Northern part of it voted almost
solidly Labour. Once they returned a Communist.

One
of the less typical places, down the road from us, was Old Battersea
House, a pleasant manor designed by Wren standing almost engulfed by
council houses and factories. The panelled walls of the many rooms
were crammed with preRaphaelite pictures of such everyday subjects as
the Vision of Ezekiel and Wisdom Strangling Ignorance. The owner was
the authoress, Mrs A F M Stirling, 98 when I met her, one of the last
of the pre-Raphaelite generation still to be with us.

She
received me in one of the remoter rooms of the manor, wearing a
purple velvet dress over which was cast a violet stole, from the
depths of her magenta sofa. She read from one of her many books a
description of Battersea in the old days:

‘Battersea
was then a straggling village, remote from London but picturesquely
situated on the wooded banks of the Thames. Fine cedars of Lebanon
grew there in stately majesty, their dark boughs hiding or revealing
the vista of lovely country fringing the shining water. But there
were grim spaces, too, in the vicinity. Marshy lands, inimicable to
health, stretching away beyond the church. Low lying localities
invaded by the Thames at high tide. And not far away a place of ill
repute, Battersea Fields. A desolate waste of 300 acres, a haunt of
vagabonds and ruffians who congregated there for boisterous orgies
and cruel sports.

‘The
whole traffic of London passed this house in those days,’ she
told me. ‘The St Johns who used to live here had their own
private ferry through the pretty village of Chelsea, and they used to
come across in that and land here.

‘This
house then had a beautiful garden of 6½ acres. And Lady St
John was a great gardener so she made the place perfectly beautiful,
and of course the lawns stretched right down to the river. The only
objection was that at high tides the river came up into the garden.
And there were real cedars of Lebanon even when we came here. There
were still a few survivors of the old original cedar of Lebanon which
grew in that garden.’

Old
Battersea House was the last of that old country village of
Battersea, with its lavender fields and manors. Looking from its
casemented windows almost point-blank at the walls of towering
council dwellings, I was reminded of the violence, the harsh
explosion, of the Industrial Revolution. The new inventions which
in the course of the 19th century brought the multitudes milling in
from the starving countryside to the factories. It was then that the
lavender fields spawned with row after row of shoddily-built houses -
the mean streets that still comprise most of Battersea. Outsiders
who got stranded or lost here tended to find it dirty or ugly.
Battersea people, however, had great loyalty.

‘I
must come to Battersea. All my friends are here,’ one of our
neighbours told me, and another said, ‘I was married in the old
church, St Mary’s, down by the river, and that has a lot of
history attached to it, and it’s got a wonderful house on the
side called Battersea House, which a lady lives there in the name of
Mrs Stirling. She’s got a passage from her house underneath,
right to the church, so that those days when years ago they never
used to have to go on the top; they could walk under the river to go
to church. There are some very nice people down Battersea, but also
however there are some very, what’s come in since the war, are
very like a distant sort of a class of people. They just don’t
want to make friends. But except for the newest class, I can go back
to where I used to live and I could spend the whole day saying
"Hello".’

3

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